Simultaneous use of two ASIO audio devices - 10 year persepective

Actually 10 years ago WDM was out and it did provide multi channel low latency recording and playback. WDM came out with Windows ME. 
 
ASIO is a Steinberg protocol. It never supported multi cards. That has not changed.  

You can use up to four Lynx interfaces together using ASIO. Lynx Two cards are so cheap I'm going to get a couple more. Should have me set for a while. I've never given WDM a real shot. It may do what you want.

John

Zargg71
Hi. There are a few companies that produces Audio Interfaces that allows working with more with that one ASIO interfaces at the time. RME is one of them.
All the best.

Well this has been true for a long time but its only due to the company making those products making it possible. ASIO is not meant to handle more than one audio device. Also they have to be from the same company. WDM has no such limitation. 

That is true. Just wanted to say it is doable.

I use ASIO4All and regularly run up to 3 Tascam interfaces simultaneously, namely:
1. US-1641
2. US-1800
3. US-16x08
 
That gives me 44 inputs and 14 outputs.
 
The timing of the individual interfaces is slightly shifted w.r.t. each other, so I have to adjust manually afterwards, a task that takes a couple of minutes. The bass drum serves as a clapper board.

Thanks for all the helpful responses.  I tried switching over to WDM/KS. It seems to work, and the driver reports low latency. However there are two problems with my setup.
1) Using ASIO, my Presonus 24.4.2AI mixer is a 40 input, 26 output interface in Sonar.  When changing to WDM, it becomes an 8 in 8 out interface .   That appears to be a Presonus issue.
2) Although I can add my secondary (Focusrite) interface in Sonar and use it simultaneously with the Presonus under WDM, the Focusrite channels are at the top of the list.   All my existing projects are then using the wrong interface.  I can't seem to find the mapping function to correct that - it is not changed with Friendly Names.
 
 
 
 

+1 for asio4all here, too, no trubs over many years use

Does patchmix still work on W10? I have an 1820M, not sure if that's the same software version. But yeah being able to run and mix (and reroute!) both Windows and ASIO audio is a great feature of that card. My RME UCX/Totalmix is even more flexible but I really like that E-MU Patchmix lets you reroute Windows audio into an ASIO input so easily. I use it to sample off YouTube, or any other app generating audio really.

ASIO's initial popularity was mainly because it allowed you to bypass Windows' built-in mixer. When Microsoft designed its intrinsic audio support, it wasn't thinking about music production, but rather the other 99.99% of applications dubbed "multimedia". Which was perfectly reasonable. Nobody cares about a few milliseconds of added latency when playing video games, showing corporate slide shows or watching porn.
 
ASIO came along to fill a need for an audio subsystem that incurred as little overhead as possible. As home recording and Windows-based audio production took off in popularity, the number of users grew to a point where Microsoft could justify revamping their audio support to accommodate power users. WASAPI was their answer to ASIO. It's nearly as efficient as ASIO but far more sophisticated. It can be either exclusive like ASIO or shared like DirectX. 
 
So why is ASIO still around? Because WASAPI is Windows-exclusive. It's much easier for vendors to write ASIO drivers for both PC and Mac platforms in one go. When I had a MOTU interface, it was obvious that the company's background is Mac- and ASIO-oriented. That's when I started using ASIO, because MOTU's ASIO driver was better than their WDM/KS driver. ASIO works great with my current Focusrite product, so I'm sticking with it (ain't broke). It's likely that some interfaces still do better with ASIO because those companies have a longer history with it.
 
ASIO4All, btw, is not really an ASIO driver. It's WDM under the hood. Its purpose is to provide a faux-ASIO driver for interfaces that don't provide one of their own. Should be a last-resort option when nothing else works. (Correction: second-to-last option; MME always works.)

When I attempted to use WASAPI drivers with my most recent computer it only identified half of my interface inputs. I'm using a Presonus Firetube Studio. Asio identified all inputs and works decent. I concluded that for older hardware Asio was the way to go. I don't see it going away anytime soon. 
Nothing spectacular in terms of latency because my latency is set automatically in my interface control panel and locked so I can't play with it, probably based on a determination made by the software based on number of drivers and return time. If I played with mostly midi every day I would have already replaced it for this reason.

MacOS uses CoreAudio, not ASIO.